Artificial Rock

Readymade sculptures are composed of objects that are not fabricated for the purpose of art, but are chosen by the artist. This concept challenges the ideologies of Western academic art and its attempt to severe art from the everyday in order to cater to the taste of the elites and bourgeoisie. In the early part of the 20th century, Duchamp created Fountain, he did not modify the urinal with which the piece is composed physically but altered it conceptually, endowing the object with a new meaning. Zhan Wang's Artificial Rock is a response to Duchamp's idea of the readymade; every stainless steel artificial scholar’s rock was a reproduction of a genuine scholar’s rock counterpart. To create these artificial scholar’s rocks, stainless steel sheets of varying sizes are laid on top of the original rock and planished into shape with a hammer, in a process somewhat parallel to printmaking. These pieces are then welded together, polished, and burnished (this process was awarded a national patent in 2002). Even selecting the original rock as a type of readymade object for the artwork is a tedious process; the rock must possess the aestetic criteria saufht after in traditional rock appreciation— thinness, openness, perforations, and wrinkling. These factors greatly influence the quality of the work. After the process of reproduction in stainless steel, all traces of the original rock can no longer be found. The stainless steel has been bestowed with the form of the original rock, completely replacing the original readymade. The distinctive identity of the artwork's original medium is thus stolen by the imitation medium. These artificial rock made from stainless steel provoke the viewers to contemplate the readymade beyond its materiality: through the reproduction in stainless steel, the duplicated rock lends its form to the artifical rock, which in turn leaves the original behind, furthermore opening up a boundless re-examiation of tradition versus contemporary society and the natural versus the man-made.